Uma abordagem assistida de inspeção funcional de protótipos de interface de software

Abstract

User interface (UI) prototyping is widely used in software development to explore solutions, demonstrate, and validate functionality, and also serves as a guide for design, implementation, and testing. To support the early identification of functional defects and avoid rework, it is essential to include prototypes in quality inspections that verify they contain all the necessary elements to represent their intended functionality. However, existing UI inspection techniques primarily focus on assessing usability or design issues and are typically applied to interactive prototypes or already implemented interfaces. The lack of functional inspection approaches for UI prototypes motivated the research question of this thesis: (QP) - How to inspect user interface prototypes regarding their functionality? To answer it, Design Science Research (DSR) was used in the development of a functional inspection approach for UI prototypes that produced two inspection tools: (i) a catalog of functional inspection heuristics (CHIF), which describes functionalities commonly represented in UI prototypes, developed from the analysis of interface prototypes and application screenshots; (ii) a general-purpose \textit{checklist} UIProtoCheck, aimed at inspecting prototypes of functionalities not characterized by heuristics. To support functional inspections, the GUIPFI (Guided User Interface Prototype Functional Inspection) tool was developed. It integrates CHIF and UIProtoCheck, featuring inspection tool recommendations, defect annotation, and report generation. The developed artifacts were evaluated through a focus group with experts, a controlled experiment, and functional inspection studies of UI prototypes in academia and with software industry professionals. The evaluations demonstrated empirical evidence of the approach's effectiveness and usefulness in identifying functional defects in UI prototypes, contributing to the theory and practice of Software Engineering.